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Gentleman player of colour

IRA ALDRIDGEThe vagabond years, 1833–1852258pp. 978 1 58046 394 2

University of Rochester Press. £30 (US $55) each.

Published: 13 June 2012

I
ra Aldridge, the first black actor of note, was a master of self-invention.
He was born in Lower Manhattan, became a professional actor in Britain and
died in Poland. By the time of his death in 1867, he was “not only the first
important black actor”, as Bernth Lindfors claims, “but also the most
visible black man in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century”. Ira
Aldridge: The early years, 1807–1833, the first volume of a two-part
biography, is a meticulously researched account of Aldridge’s birth,
upbringing and schooling in New York, his debut as a professional actor in
London, and the first eight years of performances in provincial British
theatres. Aldridge’s choice of profession was unusual for a black American
teenager. Although he performed at the short-lived African Theatre in New
York, there were no black actors on the legitimate stage in the United
States at the time. Aldridge would later claim that theatre “established the
sole end and aim of his existence”. His father wanted him to become a
preacher, but Aldridge’s epiphany occurred at the theatre, not the church.
As he watched his first dramatic performance, he realized that “his own real
existence would be worthless unless he in some way participated in such
imitations as he witnessed”. Aldridge’s account, which circulated in a
biographical pamphlet in the late 1840s, bears the hallmarks of well-crafted
retrospection. As Lindfors notes, he was quick to exploit rumours about his
black identity to curious audiences. He was soon billed as the “African
Roscius”, but he also took the stage name Mr Keane, linking him to the great
tragedian Edmund Kean.

Early critics saw his casting as little more than a gimmick

Aldridge made his debut as a seventeen-year-old at the Royalty Theatre, East
London, in 1825, playing Othello to mixed reviews. The “Gentleman of
Colour”, as he was first billed, did well enough to secure a longer stint at
the Coburg Theatre, which announced the “Celebrated American Tragedian”,
playing in The Revolt of Surinam. Early critics saw his casting as little
more than a gimmick. “The days of Theatrical dogs, horses and elephants have
passed away”, announced the Sunday Monitor’s theatre critic, but now “we are
to be treated with a Black Actor, a right earnest African Tragedian”.
Reviews of Aldridge as Oroonoko were largely positive, with the exception of
the notice in The Times, which claimed that “owing to the shape of his lips,
it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English . . .”. Lindfors
claims with polite conviction that as he toured regional theatres, Aldridge
made “a case for racial equality” by the “virtuosity of his performance”.
For the Bath Journal, his performances supported “the Anti-Slavery
advocates, that the blacks were capable of mental refinement”, but the
Figaro in London, a widely read satirical paper, launched vicious broadsides
on the “stupid looking, thick lipped, ill formed African”. As Lindfors
observes, some of the most pernicious attacks on Aldridge’s racial
background may have been part of a wider campaign to discredit abolition.
From the 1820s newspapers, including The Times and the Morning Herald,
accepted payments by lobbies to publish pro-slavery views.

In 1825, Aldridge married Margaret Gill, a white woman ten years his senior.
For the next few years, he “had to remain in perpetual motion”, touring
provincial theatres, including Lichfield, Ledbury and Hull. The schedule
enabled him to develop a repertoire of melodramatic heroes including Mungo,
Oroonoko, Rolla, Zanga and Gambia, to which he added several white roles by
1830. “Race roles remained his bread and butter”, Lindfors notes, but he
“was no longer content to be confined to black-and-tan roles”. By the early
1830s, Aldridge was claiming to be a scion of Senegalese royalty, a fiction
he would refine for his Memoir of 1848, in which he claimed that he was born
in Africa. His transformation from American to African seemed to work;
audiences flocked to see him before he returned to Senegal, a country he
would never visit.

splenetic reviews almost destroyed Aldridge’s career

In 1833, he finally made it to Covent Garden, playing Othello, and setting off
a dispute among theatre critics about whether he possessed talent or mere
novelty value. To makes things worse, Aldridge took liberties with the text,
which he delivered with “peculiar accentuations”. As Lindfors says, “there
were still those who believed that the appearance of a black actor in the
role of Othello at Covent Garden Theatre was a disgrace to the English stage
and an insult to the memory of Shakespeare”. The Athenaeum condemned the
Covent Garden performance as “truly monstrous . . . sufficient to make
[Shakespeare’s] indignant bones kick the lid from his coffin”. This widely
circulated attack, along with other splenetic reviews, almost destroyed
Aldridge’s career. It would be fifteen years before he performed on the
London stage again.

Lindfors’s second volume, Ira Aldridge: The vagabond years, 1833–1852, follows
the actor’s gruelling tours through numerous provincial theatres including
Swansea, Leeds and Dublin, performing a repertoire of roles from plays
including The Padlock, Othello and The Merchant of Venice. By the mid-1830s,
he had incorporated an introductory autobiographical lecture that blended
fact with myth and was accompanied by a medley of favourite roles, an
important addition that kept him in regular work. By 1837, Aldridge had also
added a Jim Crow song-and-dance routine to his act, adapted from Thomas
Dartmouth Rice’s popular farce Bone Squash Diablo.

Despite a more successful return to the London stage in 1848, Aldridge was
soon back on the road, captivating audiences in small towns. Realizing that
he would never again secure a major West End role, he accepted invitations
to perform in Europe, touring in Germany and Prussia, where he was awarded
the Prussian Gold Medal of the First Class for Art and Science. By the mid-
to late 1850s, he was in great demand, playing in Budapest, France,
Switzerland and Poland. He died in Lodz.

Lindfors’s handsomely produced biography is the most comprehensive book on
Aldridge since Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock’s Ira Aldridge: The negro
tragedian (1958), which was published with the cooperation of Amanda Ira
Aldridge, the actor’s only surviving daughter. The inclusion of reviews,
playbills, illustrations and lengthy citations from extant plays also make
these volumes a useful addition to nineteenth-century theatre history. One
volume might have been better than two, however. The narrative lags in
places. Sentences that begin “But before jumping ahead to that point in the
story” give a genteel tone. There are repeated discussions of how Aldridge’s
acting skills forced audiences “to acknowledge and respect the humanity of
blacks”, but the author seems unsure in his role as cultural critic, and the
writing occasionally lacks brio. Lindfors is meticulous when it comes to
facts: there are exhaustive accounts of whether Dickens might have
encountered Aldridge, but he is less convincing when it comes to the wider
social and political implications of the career of a pioneering
transatlantic actor. In 1867, the New York Clipper, unaware that Aldridge
had died in Poland, announced his debut performance at New York’s Academy of
Music. It is a poignant moment in Bernth Lindfors’s narrative. “It might
have been the crowning glory of his remarkable career.”

Douglas Field is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
Staffordshire. His book on James Baldwin for the Writers and Their Work
Series is due to be published this year.